Abstract
Aperiodic phase-locked firing found in biological neurons, called skipping, has been mainly modeled by a forced nonlinear system with noise so far. In contrast, we present another mechanism of skipping as a deterministic collective behavior in a population of coupled bursting oscillators. This collective skipping emerges when the highly irregular repetitive bursts in isolated oscillators are incompletely synchronized by coherent feedback inputs due to mutual connections. We show that the phenomenon is dependent on the coupling strength and the number of connections but almost independent of the network topology.